We’re Sorry

We had your trust, your loyalty, your Social Security numbers . . . and now we’ve lost all that. Somehow, we forgot what really matters.

Is it enough to say we’re sorry? We don’t think so. Because we want to make things right. And that starts with admitting to what we did—owning it—even when it wasn’t entirely our fault, because nothing really happened.

So, yes, accounts were created that perhaps should not have been, in the names of customers who perhaps were unaware of them, or of us. Incorrect fees were charged. Credit ratings were improperly annihilated. People got sick, pets died in transit, and the entire population of Green Valley, Wisconsin, was evicted from their homes.

Why? Maybe because we cared too much. Maybe because our field representatives were driven to succeed, to maximize profits, to meet or exceed target sales numbers by any means necessary. If that meant sitting down with clients, negotiating with clients, abducting clients from their places of employment, drugging clients, and confining clients to this or that motel in the New Mexico desert until they saw things our way, why, then, that’s what somebody caused to happen.

Does it really matter who? Of course it does. And the answer is our C.E.O. He was so notoriously colorful and demonstrative and vindictive that he created a bad culture. He said things that many found hurtful, did things that many thought inappropriate, posted things that many considered somewhat racist. And, yes, other mistakes were made. The pistol-whipping episode—he felt bad about that. We all did. That incident in the restaurant, with the chafing dish of flaming cherries jubilee and the business writer from the Times? There was no excuse for that.

That’s why we’re coming clean. We want you to know that we know that we cheated on certain emissions tests. We sourced our lettuce from providers who, epidemiologists now tell us, were not vetted as scrupulously as they could have been, or at all.

And then came the spam, the fake news, the bots, the manipulation of our platform by the Russians, and other things we ourselves didn’t really do but were done somehow, by someone. People began to believe things that weren’t literally true. It affected elections in our country and in other countries. There were riots. Governments fell. Political prisoners were executed en masse. It was a bad “look.”

Did we know that our smart speaker was secretly recording your family’s conversations and forwarding Danish translations of them to WikiLeaks? Probably not. Did we know that our facial-recognition software could be spoofed by someone wearing a rubber King Kong mask? We do now.

And so we’re going to fix things. We’re instituting a new culture—a culture of listening, and of telling you that we’re listening, and of keeping you informed about our new culture. We’re implementing a policy of enhanced background checks, so you can be confident that the employee who sulks or snaps at you or harasses you has a bachelor’s degree or better. We’re writing new algorithms to make sure that the news items you see in your feed are at least partly a hundred per cent true. We’re eliminating target sales goals for local branch managers and announcing a policy of paying bonuses only for performance that exceeds a certain minimum.

We’re doing all this and more because we want to win back your trust. If we can’t win back your trust, then we’ll make every effort to at least win back your business. Is that too much to ask? We don’t think so. O.K.? Please? ♦